Boys and Journals
I had someone ask me an interesting question this week, “would someone buy a boy a journal as a gift?”
In some ways, the answer is staring me in the face. Look at the incredible popularity of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”. Then again, it was still his Mum’s idea.
Still, how often do we view journal keeping as purely a girl’s domain – with locks to hide secrets, emotional outpourings about the latest “crush” and lots of pink and gold sparkles? Meanwhile boys are seen as having an incredibly limited range of interests – sport, video games and Lego. Yet this is far from the truth.
Let’s project forward a few years, to when these boys grow up. Not all men become sport stars or computer game gurus. Men in our society are writers, artists, politicians, engineers, scientists, teachers, designers, cartoonists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and a host of other careers paths that require journal or notebook keeping skills.
Go back in history and we find a wealth of insight and knowledge in notebooks, diaries, logbooks and journals of some of the world’s greatest and most interesting men – Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Earnest Shackleton, Lewis Carroll, Harry Truman, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Andy Warhol, the list goes on…
This week I found a wonderful blog called WanderMonster, in which a father (who admittedly is a designer by trade) posts a mini-comic on the inside lid of his son’s lunchbox each day. It is only half-complete. It is up to the son to complete the rest of the illustration/story. Often, these sticky-note drawings will relate to current discussions or events in their lives. Over the years, this has evolved into an incredible project, recording the gradual growth and development of this young boy (and probably of his Dad too). I know from my own experience, that daily life with an imaginative little boy is full of stories, adventures, characters, drama and lots of laughter. How wonderful to capture that!
The fact is, with a little imagination and prompting, boys do keep journals – they just might not look exactly the same as their well-meaning Mums imagined (a certain Wimpy Kid’s, for example).
Remember, there are a whole range of options – field notes, cartoons, sketchbooks and notebooks to name a few. Let’s leave that whole “Dear Diary…” thing to the girls!
Tonight, rather than providing all the answers, I’m throwing it open to you. If you have some examples or suggestions for boys and journal keeping, I’d love to hear them.
2
Kerri says:
June 28, 2011 at 9:15 am
As we are not up to reading writing in our house of boys yet, we’ve started a sticking and pasting book of special things. This serves many purposes: a place to keep bench cluttering items, my son gets to look after his own special things in his own way, it is a type of journal of growth. We actually have two of them, one is for ” snippings” Bunnings catalogues, i have learnt, are a little boys most treasured possession. The second book is for special things only. (Rather than things on special!)